Search This Blog

Trump's rhetoric on North Korea echoes loudly in void of US diplomacy

It took more
than seven months for the Trump administration to encounter its first real
foreign crisis, and when it came, it was largely self-inflicted.

The
challenge posed by the North Korean regime’s nuclear weapons programme had been
festering for more than a decade but it was Donald Trump who turned it into a
global emergency with a few words.

The president took his own staff unawares
when he went off script on Tuesday to vow “fire and fury like the world has
never seen” if the Pyongyang regime made further threats against the US.

As the Kim
Jong-un government routinely churns out threats, the president’s choice of
words was always going to be a hostage to fortune.

And within hours North Korea
had responded with a detailed threat to drop missiles in the sea around the US
island territory of Guam.

On Friday,
in the face of global appeals to dial down the rhetoric, Trump did the
opposite, turning a thorny geopolitical nuisance into a personal arm-wrestling
contest with Kim.

The North Korean leader would “truly regret” any move on Guam
or other US or allied territories.

Before the week was out, the 160,000 people
on the island were being issued official advice on what to do, and what not to
do, in the event of a nuclear blast. (Take cover, but don’t look into the
“flash or fireball”).

By way of a parting shot on Friday evening, Trump also
mentioned he was not ruling out a military option for dealing with Venezuela.

It is one of
the core tasks of the state department to try to ensure that global crises do
not turn into wars, but it is currently struggling with an existential crisis
of its own.

The Trump White House has called for its budget to be cut by a
third, and installed at its helm Rex Tillerson, a former oil executive who has
shown little interest in drawing on the experience and analysis of its
diplomatic corps.

State diplomatic officials say they continue to send memos
and reports and urgent requests up to the department’s leadership on the
seventh floor of the Foggy Bottom headquarters, but rarely hear anything back,
so that even routine messages to foreign governments go unsent.

Tillerson
has hired outside experts to consult 300 of the staff prior to a major
reorganisation due to begin next month, but as the administration has already
announced there will be an 8% cut in staffing levels, many assume the outcome
of the restructuring has been cooked in advance.

Tillerson
lost the trust of the rank and file by failing to defend the department with
any vigour when he was cross-examined in Congress, even by sympathetic
senators.

The Texan oil man’s advantage was supposed to have been his access to
the president.

And he does lunch at the White House more than any other cabinet
secretary, but access has apparently not won him respect.

Several of
his choices for senior posts have been turned down by the political staff in
the White House for their apparent insufficient devotion to Trump’s “America
First” agenda.

Tillerson’s frustration reportedly boiled over into an angry
outburst at the head of the White House personnel office at the end of June,
earning him a rebuke from the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, for being
“unprofessional”. To add to the humiliation, the dressing-down was leaked.

When it came
to North Korea and Venezuela this week, there was no sign that Trump had
listened to any state department advice and referred exclusively to the
military options available to him, shrugging off talk of diplomacy.

Tillerson’s
role in policymaking was played down by the White House on Thursday.

After
Trump made his “fire and fury” threat on television, Tillerson sought to
mitigate the fallout by assuring Americans they could “sleep well at night” as
there was no imminent threat of conflict.

Asked about Tillerson’s comments on
BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Sebastian Gorka – a British-born
Hungarian-American whose educational credentials and links to the far right
have come under scrutiny – declared: “You should listen to the president; the
idea that secretary Tillerson is going to discuss military matters is simply
nonsensical.”

The
dismissive tone drew a riposte from the state department spokeswoman, Heather
Nauert, who pointed out: “He’s a cabinet secretary.

He’s fourth in line to the
presidency. He carries a big stick.”

The very
public dissing of the state department and diplomacy has hit home.

Thomas
Countryman, who was undersecretary for arms control and international security
until January, said: “There are the general indicators of the White House
constantly seeking to demean and marginalise the state department in
inter-agency policy discussions. Those are of great concern to me.

“It makes
everything more difficult if we actually get into a military confrontation with
North Korea. You need the state department in order to dial down a conflict.”

Worse was to
come on Thursday. Vladimir Putin’s order at the end of July for the US to cut
its diplomatic staff in Russia by 755 had been met by complete silence from the
White House.

Trump has never criticised the Russian president, and when he did
finally address the Kremlin’s move on Thursday, he triggered outrage by
thanking Putin for saving him having to cut staff himself.

“I want to
thank him because we’re trying to cut down on payroll,” Trump told reporters.
“We’ll save a lot of money.”

White House
officials later said this was an example of sarcasm, but that was little
comfort to diplomats packing their bags and hastily uprooting their lives in
Russia.

“As a
foreign service veteran, I find it lamentable that our great career diplomats
are treated with such disrespect by their president,” said Nicholas Burns, a
former under-secretary of state for political affairs.

Another
state department veteran, Moira Whelan, said on Twitter: “A lot of civil
servants I know are working out more, redo-ing houses.

They aren’t busy at work
so have time. finding happiness elsewhere.”

Among the
senior diplomatic posts that have remained unfilled are some that have become
all the more crucial in the past few days.

These include Countryman’s old job,
in which he was acting as “undersecretary T”, required to sign off on US arms
sales or security assistance abroad, and charged with negotiating, implementing
and verifying international arms control agreements and international security.

Another
vacancy is the assistant secretary of state for east Asian and Pacific affairs.

According to Buzzfeed, Tillerson wanted the person acting in the role, Susan
Thornton, to be given the job, but he was overridden by the White House, who
seemed to find Thornton insufficiently gung-ho about America First.

Nor is
there a US ambassador to Seoul.

A rumoured leading candidate, Victor Cha, is
said to have earned a black mark for co-authoring a newspaper commentary with a
former Clinton aide.

“This
absolutely has a very critical impact. You don’t have the entities in place,”
said Stephen Noerper, a former senior analyst at the state department.

“You
need to have had an assistant secretary who has been in play for a while.

You
really should have an ambassador in Seoul who can mitigate the situation … I
can’t overstate the critical nature of the need for these folks to be put in
place.”

On the day
that Trump declared that military solutions to the North Korean problems were
“locked and loaded” it was reported that the state department had had a
backchannel to the North Koreans at the United Nations. Joseph Yun, the US
envoy for North Korea policy, had been talking to Pak Song-il, a senior North
Korean diplomat at the UN mission, about US detainees but also broader issues.

However,
there appear to have been no talks since the war of words erupted between Trump
and Kim. Trump seemed dismissive of the effort on Friday.

Even if the contacts
restart, the North Koreans are likely to wonder if they are talking to a US
agency with any clout.

Max
Bergmann, a former senior official in the state department policy planning
staff said the steady hollowing out of the department “escalates the current
danger because there is no one credibly speaking for the president besides the
president himself”.

“This means
that the North Koreans will simply ignore what [the department] has to say and
will look to those with the means to initiate war – the president and the US
military,” Bergmann said.

“This puts the military in an extremely awkward spot
as they are not diplomats and are trained to always show resolve, but echoing
the president’s rhetoric in this case could lead North Korea to tragically
miscalculate.”

Bergmann’s
conclusion was that because of the administration’s own actions and disregard
for the state department: “The US is not diplomatically prepared to deal with
this crisis.”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The document
you see on the image is the order of the commander of the Tehran repressive
force to all the units based in the city.

Based on
this agenda, the mercenaries of the corrupt government Islamic Republic of Iran
have been allowed to use firearms in the event of any protest movement against
people by the regime. This is a
murder command. The
repressive force of the law, known to the world's famous police and guardians,
should protect the lives of its citizens, by freeing their mercenaries, they
allow them to murder Iranians who are protesting the corruption in the
government and you have the important message that if you come to the streets
in protest of corruption and torture and massacre, we will kill you. Because, according to criminal Khomeini, maintenance of the system is
obligatory. A corrupt government that is so hideous that spend billions of dollars from
the national treasury and popular capitalto the suppression of its people
and the countries of the region, must be ov…